Despite his reputation for intellectual heterodoxy, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) actually set a high value on the political discipline of theoretical activity. This article revisits Mariátegui as a theorist of intellectual discipline within the Marxist tradition. In doing so, the article complicates prevailing ideas about the heterodoxy of Mariátegui’s Marxism and of his thought in general. Moreover, by reading Mariátegui in terms of discipline as much as heterodoxy, this article unsettles historiographical conventions about Mariátegui’s attitude to various political practices and ideas, including cosmopolitanism and diaspora.
The basic idea of Mariátegui as a heterodox interwar Marxist is well justified. Mariátegui made several innovations in Marxism between the late 1910s and his death in 1930, including the reinterpretation of the indigenous Andean peasantry as a possible agent of socialist world revolution.Footnote 1 In trying to globalize European Marxism to Latin America and Peru, Mariátegui also created a new, cosmopolitan reading of the Peruvian imagined community.Footnote 2 Moreover, in his editorial and publishing activity, Mariátegui developed new models for socialist communication strategy with journals including Labor and Amauta.Footnote 3
The interpretation of Mariátegui as a heterodox Marxist has multiple sources, and it has been done in different historical contexts since 1930. It actually began with the relatively hostile line of the Peruvian Communist Party—which Mariátegui had cofounded in 1928—under Eudocio Ravines during the 1930s, when the party attempted to disassociate from Mariátegui’s “heterodox” and “populist” departures as it drew closer to an increasingly Stalinist Comintern.Footnote 4 But Mariátegui’s heterodox innovations within Marxism have since been rearticulated in more positive terms. The New Left in Latin America revisited Mariátegui as foundational to a Latin American Marxist tradition distinguished from the idea of a Eurocentric Soviet orthodoxy. In this approach, Mariátegui’s heterodox development of Marxism represented a necessary point of departure for adapting that theory to the peculiar conditions of Latin America, including the region’s position in relation to the global accumulation regime of capitalist imperialism, and distinctively Latin American processes and structures of racialization.Footnote 5
More recently, since the 1990s, the influential discourse of decolonial theory—most associated with Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano—has valorized Mariátegui’s intellectual heterodoxy, too, albeit in a very different way. The decolonial tradition has claimed Mariátegui as an antecedent and archetype for its political ideal of a “delinking” of indigenous cultures in the global South from the epistemological categories of (a certain idea of) “Western modernity.” This approach to Mariátegui requires the assertion that he made fundamental departures from Marxism, categorized as an instance of the Western episteme.Footnote 6 However, this reading of Mariátegui is profoundly ahistorical. The recent global turn in Mariátegui scholarship, pioneered by Martín Bergel, makes clear that the interpretation of Mariátegui’s thought as a fundamental critique of the West, and especially Western modernity, is historically absurd. It only requires close reading of Mariátegui’s work in context during the 1920s to understand that he was a fundamentally cosmopolitan thinker whose conception of the global was built around an explicitly occidentalist ideal of modernity, including where he creatively combined this ideal with certain axioms and claims of Peruvian indigenismo.Footnote 7
Moreover, unlike the New Left and more recent global rereadings of Mariátegui, decolonial theory, in its exaggeration and mischaracterization of Mariátegui’s heterodoxy, fails to understand the fundamental role of Bolshevik-inflected Marxism in his political thought. In this sense, decolonial theory, which represents the principal Latin American iteration of the wider postcolonial turn of the 1980s and 1990s, has done to Mariátegui what has been done in different ways to other twentieth-century Marxists in the (semi)colonial world: it takes Mariátegui’s heterodox departures within Marxism, especially departures that responded to the peculiar social conditions of a non-European world region, as license to decontextualize his work from Marxism as such.
Thus, in relation to the decolonial interpretation of Mariátegui, this intervention, by focusing on his thought about intellectual discipline in the context of the world communist movement, reasserts the importance of Marxist orthodoxy for a holistic understanding of Mariátegui’s political thought, including his heterodox departures. But reading Mariátegui in terms of intellectual discipline—which he understood principally in terms of (1) the unity of theory and practice and (2) the rigorous application of Marxist method to social analysis and political actionFootnote 8—also illuminates features of theoretical activity that have been overlooked by the broader tendency among scholars, extending beyond the recent decolonial current, to privilege heterodoxy in the analysis of Mariátegui as a thinker.Footnote 9
In a (very) loose sense, therefore, this article tilts back towards the analytical posture of Peruvian “Old Left” communists, led by Mariátegui’s old friend, Jorge del Prado, to rehabilitate him politically as an orthodox Marxist–Leninist.Footnote 10 Of course, this reading has been (gainfully) overwritten since the New Left began to celebrate Mariátegui as an innovator of Marxism; but the point here is to explore and amend the ways in which this revisionist tendency since the 1960s has overextended. Rather than revert from the reading of Mariátegui as heterodox and innovative to an exclusive stress on orthodoxy and discipline, this article instead shows how orthodoxy and heterodoxy, intellectual discipline and autonomy, were combined by Mariátegui. This combination is key to a historical understanding of his creativity within Marxism, and its (often self-conscious) limits.
As for the key terms used here, including “intellectual discipline,” “orthodoxy,” “heterodoxy,” and “dogma,” a priori definition carries analytical risk. The article is as much about analyzing how these categories were used in Mariátegui’s own writing. That being said, it is quickly apparent that his ideal of intellectual discipline had both a “bottom-up” and a “top-down” dimension. In the former sense, Mariátegui could imagine good, materialist social theory resulting “organically” from the situation of theoretical activity within the organized proletariat, without a need for the top-down setting of “party lines.” In the latter sense, Mariátegui frequently called for theorizing to be done within the framework of a disciplined socialist political organization—a framework which necessarily infringed upon the ideal of the total individual autonomy of intellectual activity through the imposition of political duty. These were the coordinates of Mariátegui’s unity of theory and practice, a concept which he expressed with various formulae of his own, such as the theological description of revolutionary Marxism, developed in a review of Unamuno’s Agony of Christianity, as a combination of “spirit and word” as opposed to being a hermeneutical “tyranny of the letter.”Footnote 11
Mariátegui also recognized the potential for generative intellectual disciplina to decay into stagnant dogma, typically due to an excess of top-down political direction. This concern becomes evident in his writing during the late 1920s, amid the advance of Stalinism in the world communist movement. Mariátegui used the term dogma as a negative antinomy for the term doctrina,Footnote 12 by which he meant the model form of political theorizing and practice, reasoned and justified by a coherent method responsive to the world-historical moment: that is, in the 1920s, Marxism. Whereas Mariátegui often used the term disciplina itself positively, doctrina best captured the concept and ideal of intellectual discipline in his lexicon. As for ortodoxia, Mariátegui’s meaning was ambivalent: it was not synonymous with dogma and it could be given a positive value, depending on whose orthodoxy. In the case of a historically declining class such as the capitalist bourgeoisie, “orthodoxy”—laissez-faire political economy and liberal parliamentarism—was a negative, contrasted to the “heterodox” reformism of post-World War I theorists such as Francesco Nitti and John Maynard Keynes.Footnote 13 Whereas in the case of the historically ascendant proletariat, Mariátegui interpreted its “orthodoxy” of socialist world revolution as a positive value to be defended.Footnote 14 This absence of a consistent normative binary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Mariátegui’s rhetoric reflects his effort to transcend such a framing in his political theory and practice, as will now be seen.
The pre-1917 context: embracing Marxism as a modern orthodoxy
The Bolshevik Marxism that Mariátegui took up in postwar Europe put a high value on the political discipline of intellectual activity, especially in relation to party political organization.Footnote 15 But Mariátegui was already primed to embrace a more regimented mode of political theory by his experience of Peruvian politics during the earlier 1910s. When he left for Europe, Mariátegui was fatigued by what he saw as the superficiality of an intra-elite party politics in Peru during the period now known as the ‘Aristocratic Republic’ (1899–1919), which had entered a moment of organic crisis by the late 1910s.Footnote 16 Moreover, Mariátegui was also critical of the personalism that he identified with Peruvian and Latin American political culture more widely, articulated by the idea of caudillismo since independence, by which Mariátegui meant a politics of personal charisma (demagogy) and relations (clientelism), without theoretical rigor, principled motivation, or popular agency.Footnote 17 Mariátegui would associate both of these political tendencies with the instrumentalization of political language, and a corresponding dearth of ideological rigor in Peruvian politics.
Mariátegui understood the marginalization of what he termed “doctrine”—understood as an internally coherent method for the analysis of social reality—in Peruvian politics as a lack of modernity, itself an ideal that was normatively central to Mariátegui’s thought and which he conceptualized as determinately Western.Footnote 18 Moreover, Mariátegui’s need for a more modern and theoretically coherent politics in Peru was shared across the political spectrum, including outside Mariátegui’s vanguardist intellectual milieu. For example, the social Catholic intellectual Víctor Andrés Belaunde (1883–1966) similarly lamented the personalism of Peruvian politics during the 1910s and called for more intellectual content in visions of political order.Footnote 19 But whereas Belaunde imagined the advent of modernity in Peru as the creation of a properly bourgeois republic, with effective state institutions and separation of powers, and ruled by an enlightened, nation-building middle class, Mariátegui saw it in Bolshevik socialism: radically different answers to the same (idea of a) peculiarly Peruvian question.
In his earliest writings on the Bolshevik Revolution, Mariátegui imagined this new form of socialism as being able to elevate Latin American politics from the level of personality to the higher level of doctrinal rigor based upon the social analysis of political realities. Thus Mariátegui commended early pro-Bolshevik “Maximalists” in Peru for their unconcern about the traditionally defining questions of Peruvian politics to do with the old party system, as compared to social claims and international issues.Footnote 20 Mariátegui saw Bolshevik praxis as the means for Peru to escape the superficiality and parochialism of a premodern political regime. Indeed, from the outset, Mariátegui identified socialism with modernity in the wake of 1917. As he asserted in April 1918, “every modern man is a socialist!”Footnote 21
Mariátegui’s embrace of Bolshevism as a means to deepen Peruvian politics was further developed through his critique of the new presidency of Augusto Leguía (1863–1932) that emerged in 1919 (a critique that quickly led to Mariátegui’s exile to Europe). Leguía came to power in July 1919 as an outwardly revolutionary candidate in the context of a wave of worker and student protest amid postwar inflation.Footnote 22 Briefly, Mariátegui, alongside other left intellectuals in Peru, imagined Leguía as a vehicle for social revolution and the overthrow of the established political elite.Footnote 23 However, in response to Leguía’s appointment of ancien regime figures to his cabinet, Mariátegui began to denounce the new government from a socialist standpoint as lacking any coherent program, failing to satisfy the popular demand for a social—not merely political—transformation, and thus regressing to the political habit of vacuous clientelism. Mariátegui argued that the heterogeneity of Leguía’s cabinet, combining a minority of social reformers with a majority of status quo politicians, was evidence that the new regime was not “spiritually cohesive and defined,” and that therefore it lacked a “modern physiognomy.”Footnote 24 Incoherence of ideals—of “spirit”—was the sign that Leguía’s revolution did not represent the much-needed modernizing project for Peru and, therefore, did not represent a genuine revolution.
In Mariátegui’s sharpest critique of Leguía for squandering the potential of 1919—censored before publication—Mariátegui began to elaborate the importance of a unity between theory and practice for structuring revolutionary activity even before his detailed engagement with Marxism in Europe. Mariátegui argued that substantively transformative governments are sustained by the “calid and doctrinaire conviction of the collective masses,” as distinct from a single, spontaneous origin, whereas Leguía neglected popular opinion.Footnote 25 Thus Mariátegui connected the positive value of “doctrinaire” rigor to embedment in collective, mass politics. Mariátegui then continued that, if Leguía had actually intended to lead a transformative government, he would have formed a “strong and disciplined nucleus” of cadres, united by “doctrine” and a unanimous ideal, in contrast to the mixed and primarily traditional cabinet he had now appointed.Footnote 26 Again, the concept of “doctrine” was providing the coherence and “discipline” necessary for a revolutionary project.
In the censored 1919 article, Mariátegui asked the rhetorical question, key for his concept of revolution, “Can a … modern government be made with these men [Leguía’s cabinet]?” He answered in the negative because, even disregarding the reactionary appointments, Leguía himself did not represent a “doctrinaire” current of opinion but only a personalized political force.Footnote 27 Thus the idea of a modern politics, regimented and empowered by ideologically coherent “doctrine(s),” was already being defined by Mariátegui against the characteristic personalism of premodern, postcolonial Peru and Latin America; the real revolution would be a “modern and elevated struggle” and a “great controversy of ideas and doctrines.”Footnote 28
Thus, whereas many other intellectuals in the (semi)colonial world who embraced Marxism–Leninism after 1917 did so, at least at first, for its strident anti-imperialism, Mariátegui, while by no means uninterested in the Bolsheviks’ critique of empire, was most attracted to the new doctrine as a vehicle of modernization in the postcolonial context of early twentieth-century Latin America, and specifically “modernization” in the sense of a new, more meaningful politics defined by both political commitment and intellectual discipline.Footnote 29 Whereas the Bolshevik Revolution gained uptake in Asia and Africa as a resource for contesting continued and direct imperial domination by the capitalist powers, it made headway in South America as a means to overcome the social and political challenges of postcolonial existence during the long nineteenth century.
Mariátegui’s critique of intellectual indiscipline
The problems of intellectualism under modern capitalism
During Mariátegui’s exile in Europe between 1919 and 1923, he developed a clearer understanding of the international communist movement, and a greater political commitment to it. He also gained a more detailed knowledge of Marxism–Leninism and its underlying theoretical principles of historical materialism. This Marxist political education shaped Mariátegui’s critique of politically uncommitted intellectualism after he returned to Peru. Another contributing factor was the evident failure of Mariátegui’s initial, speculative hope before 1919 that socialism might be popularized in Peruvian society on a cross-class basis, aided by a national cultural elite, by the force of its rationality alone—as a process of enlightenment rather than class struggle.Footnote 30 Yet by 1923 anti-Bolshevism was growing—not diminishing—in Peru and Latin America, including through the intellectual activity of the buena gente criolla that Mariátegui had expected to convert to socialism as a result of rational persuasion after 1917. Thus the force of ideas alone no longer appeared sufficient to globalize Marxism, and to explain this fact Mariátegui turned to problems with the (bourgeois) intellectual condition itself.
During the 1920s, Mariátegui elaborated a comprehensive critique of the figure of the intellectual in isolation from the labor movement. In the first instance, Mariátegui criticized the tendency of intellectuals to refuse the disciplinary and organizational imperatives of political commitment, even when they were formally progressive in their discourse and aesthetic. Thus Mariátegui identified the intellectual condition per se with an unrevolutionary antipolitics. In a 1924 article, he argued that “intellectuals are generally averse to discipline, programs, and systems. Their psychology is individualistic and their thought is heterodox. Above all, their sense of individuality is excessive and overwhelming. The intellectual’s individuality is almost always felt as being above the common rules. Lastly, a disdain for politics is frequent among intellectuals.”Footnote 31 Mariátegui was criticizing the intellectual tendency to “heterodoxy” as such for creating an incapacity for the political commitment necessary to revolutionary action. And Mariátegui explained this tendency in terms of the individualist psychological condition of the intellectual, itself materially conditioned by the isolation of the intellectual from mass politics—from a unity between theory and practice. In the same text, where Mariátegui was praising Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) and his Clarté circle in France as a model of revolutionary intellectual activity for the post-1917 world, Mariátegui contrasted the individualist, heterodox intellectual with the qualitatively distinct figure of a revolutionary one, in terms of the latter’s self-subordination to a mass movement: “The revolution is a political work. It is a concrete realization. Removed from the masses that make it, no one can serve it efficaciously and validly. Revolutionary labor cannot be isolated, individual, disparate. The intellectuals of true revolutionary affiliation have no other remedy than to accept a position in a collective action.”Footnote 32
Insofar as Mariátegui was willing to concede that, historically at least, the intellectualist critique of politics as reducible to passive bureaucracy and individual self-interest was valid, he insisted that in revolutionary historical conjunctures, such as the present one opened by the Russian Revolution, such a cynical attitude towards politics ceased to apply. Mariátegui argued that in such conjunctures the political “transcends the vulgar and it invades and dominates all the arenas of human life … no liberated spirit, no sensitive mind, can be indifferent to such a conflict.”Footnote 33 Thus, under revolutionary conditions, the antipolitics inherent to intellectualism becomes factually inaccurate and normatively sterile, even reactionary.
Indeed, on the topic of Italian Futurism and its alignment with fascist anticommunism during the 1920s, Mariátegui argued that the incapacity of intellectuals qua intellectuals to subordinate the sphere of intellectual activity to political organization was a pathway to fascism via the aestheticization of politics. In a 1930 essay contrasting the Futurists’ reactionary turn with the enduring revolutionary vocation of French surrealism, Mariátegui argued that the Futurists had unleashed upon politics the anarchic, absolute subjectivity proper only to art, thereby exposing that milieu to co-optation by fascism. Instead, aesthetic experimentation ought to be separate from and subordinate to revolutionary organization rooted in Marxist political theory, judgment and action; as a basis for politics, the aesthetic tended to the spectacular, experimental, and theoretically disordered form represented by fascist reaction.Footnote 34
Mariátegui also developed an argument that the intellectual condition contained a direct tendency to political conservatism via antipolitics: “Behind an apparent aesthetic repugnance for politics, dissimulated and hidden, sometimes there is a vulgarly conservative sentiment. The writer and artist do not like to confess openly and explicitly to being reactionaries. But there has always been a certain intellectual modesty to show solidarity with the old and obsolete.”Footnote 35 In this view, the antipolitics of the intellectual was merely performative, intended to conceal a substantively conservative political consciousness that was uncouth yet practically widespread in the context of avant-garde artistic milieux.
Mariátegui attributed this underlying “conservative sentiment” of intellectuals to two causes. First, the typically petit bourgeois material position of the intellectual in Europe and the Americas, as a member of the middle classes:
The intellectual, like any idiot, is subject to the influence of his environment, education, and interests. His intelligence does not function freely. He has a natural inclination to accommodate himself to the most convenient ideas, not the most just. The reaction of an intellectual, in a word, is born from the same motives and roots as the reaction of a shopkeeper. The language is different, but the mechanism of the attitude is identical.Footnote 36
Through the lens of historical materialism, Mariátegui deconstructed the (related) idealist presuppositions that theoretical activity can transcend its material conditions and that the culturally recognized “intellectual” has a qualitatively different, socially unmediated relation to thinking compared to the “nonintellectual.” In doing so, Mariátegui could argue that the petit bourgeois social position of most intellectuals engendered political reaction in the same way as it did for the wider social base of contemporary right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. Thus, like Antonio Gramsci in the same conjuncture, Mariátegui problematized the conventional distinction between the intellectual and the nonintellectual.
The second cause of intellectual reaction for Mariátegui was the fact that, outside a unity between theory and practice within the organized labor movement, the isolated intellectual became exposed to the patronizing and clientelist power of capital. Mariátegui argued in 1925 that “today’s artist is a courtesan of the bourgeoisie, but yesterday’s artist was a courtesan of the aristocracy … one servitude is as valid as the other.”Footnote 37 The modern artist did tend to resent the commodification of his “genius” under capitalism: “The painter, the sculptor, the writer are not the most active or apparent of the capitalist order’s discontents. But they are intrinsically the harshest and most inflamed.”Footnote 38 However, when situated outside the proletarian movement and its future-oriented project of overcoming capitalism by a modernizing, socialist revolution, the artistic resentment of capitalist commodification tended to manifest as a reactionary romanticism, especially in the aesthetic form of neo-feudal nostalgia, in which the medieval is understood as a higher, aesthetic epoch counterposed to bourgeois materialism.Footnote 39 And for Mariátegui this neo-medievalist romanticism also contained fascistic potential in the postwar conjuncture, distinct from the futurist discourse of Italian fascism yet also proceeding through the aestheticization of politics.Footnote 40
Thus, after 1917, Mariátegui was a consistent critic of the intellectual condition under capitalism; he identified it as a source of political reaction, especially due to its heterodox tendency. Moreover, Mariátegui’s critique of intellectualism was not sui generis but endemic to interwar Marxism. A critique of the intellectual condition was a central theme of Gramsci’s work in the context of early Italian communism—the same context which had been so formative for Mariátegui’s own Marxism (Mariátegui spent most of his European exile in central and northern Italy, where he networked with the early communist milieu in the country).Footnote 41 And Henri Barbusse, whom Mariátegui met while in Paris and continued to engage with thenceforth, also elaborated a Marxist critique of the postwar French intelligentsia during the 1920s; a critique that had a direct influence on Mariátegui’s own thinking about the unity of theory and practice.Footnote 42
Marxist critiques of intellectualism were being elaborated by others in the context of early Latin American communism, too. The Cuban Julio Antonio Mella (1903–29) was important here. Both Mella and Mariátegui were involved in the same transnational networks during the 1920s, including the Comintern and its ancillaries.Footnote 43 Mella was trying to build a communist movement in Cuba in the same transnational context of student radicalism where Mariátegui was doing the same thing, at the same time, in Peru. This transnational student activism had been motivated by the university reform movement which had become Latin America-wide since it emerged in Argentina in 1918 and, as a shared context for promoting Bolshevik-aligned Marxism in the region, it engendered certain conceptual similarities in Mella and Mariátegui’s thought.Footnote 44 In particular, their similar critique of intellectualism was in part a response to emergent forms of left anticommunism within the transnational student milieu in Latin America, especially once it became articulated by the Latin America-wide (yet Peru-centric) APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) under the bourgeois student leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) from the mid-1920s; both Mella and Mariátegui polemicized with Haya, including on the theme of intellectualism.Footnote 45 Mariátegui and Mella’s Marxist critiques of the intellectual make sense together, in the regional context of interwar student radicalism, as an effort to move away from the figure of the university student intellectual, and the age-based category of ‘youth’ more widely, as the imagined agent of revolutionary change in modern Latin America, and towards that of the global proletariat.Footnote 46
Aprismo as intellectual indiscipline in Latin America
Mariátegui developed a critique of specifically Latin American intellectualism during the 1920s in the context of his debate with Haya, after the open split between Peruvian communists and Haya’s faction of apristas in 1928. Having collaborated as a united front since 1923, the two currents diverged over Haya’s effort to transform APRA into a homogeneous political party and his increasingly critical stance towards Bolshevik Marxism in Latin America as a “European” ideology. Mariátegui’s consequent polemic against aprismo—through which he intended to delegitimize Haya and maintain the loyalty of as much of the Peruvian left as possible—distilled his critique of intellectual indiscipline as a cause of disorganization and, thus, debilitation for social revolution in interwar Latin America. Specifically, Mariátegui critiqued Haya’s new departure as a retrogression from political modernity to premodern caudillismo.
In a December 1928 letter to Eudocio Ravines (1897–1979), then a Peruvian comrade studying in Paris, Mariátegui justified the creation of a distinct communist party in Peru—the Peruvian Socialist Party (PSP)—as a response to the schism with APRA.Footnote 47 In doing so, Mariátegui attributed Haya’s abandonment of “the theory and practice of socialism” to the persistent “demon of caudillismo and personalism” in Peruvian political culture.Footnote 48 Mariátegui likened Haya’s new anticommunist aprismo to the proto-populist formations of Arturo Alessandri in Chile and Hipólito Yrigoyen in Argentina.Footnote 49 And whereas Mariátegui conceded that such caudillismo could still, in certain cases, be a useful instrument for revolutionary strategy in Latin America, this was only on the condition that it was subordinated to a “doctrine, to a group”Footnote 50—that is, to the disciplinary effect of Marxist doctrinal rigor elaborated within the social context and fecund limits of the labor movement. Instead of this arrangement, however, Haya was acting independently of the Peruvian working classes—of any working class—from his position in exile activist circles during the late 1920s, therefore his ideological activity had lost any doctrinal order and it had reverted to the purely instrumental, “demagogic” rhetoric that Mariátegui attributed to the premodern morass of postcolonial politics in Latin America. Mariátegui argued that
language does not matter to Haya; to me it does, and not due to literary preoccupations but ideological and moral ones. If we do not distinguish ourselves from the past in political language, at least, I fear that, in the end, due to the same reasons of adaptation and mimicry, we will end up being different only in terms of individuals and personalities.Footnote 51
At the same time as his letter to Ravines, Mariátegui had a terser correspondence with the APRA cell in Mexico City, which he judged to have already aligned with Haya in the emerging split. In this text, Mariátegui assimilated the argument that aprismo represented a recrudescence of the pre-socialist and (therefore) premodern “Creole demagogy” of Latin American radicalism—“the old politics”—to a critique of aprismo as entailing a comparatively modern, fascist politics, precisely due to its intellectual indiscipline. Mariátegui condemned Haya for his pure instrumentalization of rhetoric by arguing that the political communication strategy of the left in Latin America since the early 1920s had been defined by its basis in social truth; that is, sober analysis of material reality as the principle of revolutionary practical and theoretical activity, including political propaganda.Footnote 52 Now, however, Haya had deviated from this method by pursuing propaganda as the ends rather than just the means of political action. In Mariátegui’s analysis, this move opened the way to a Latin American fascism through a process analogical to the subjectification and aestheticization of politics in contemporary Italy.Footnote 53
To substantiate the claim that Haya’s new iteration of aprismo represented an incipient fascism emerging from within the Latin American left, Mariátegui pointed to the fact that a dominant current of Italian fascism had a similar trajectory: “who were the fascists at the beginning? Almost all of them emerged from the revolutionary milieu.”Footnote 54 In Mariátegui’s analysis, the defection of revolutionary socialists to fascism took place through a performative radicalism, whereby individuals restyled themselves as more radical than communism through an attack on “revolutionary bureaucracy” (valued positively by Mariátegui) leading to the destruction of worker organization; that is, the necessary condition of socialist revolution: “The tactics [of ultra-leftism in Italy] demanded that they attack the revolutionary bureaucracy, to break with the Socialist Party, to destroy the workers’ organizations. For this enterprise, the bourgeoisie supplied them with men, vehicles, arms, and money. Socialism and the proletariat, despite all of its bureaucratic ballast, were the revolution. Fascism, in effect, had a reactionary function.”Footnote 55 Thus Mariátegui assembled the different practical and discursive threads of fascist reaction in his forecast of aprismo under Haya, and attributed them to indiscipline: he counterposed a wanton and purely discursive ultra-leftism to a positively valued ideal of bureaucracy, understood as the practical and disciplined institutions of worker organization which concretized the revolutionary unity of theory and practice; and Mariátegui also indicated that this inversive tendency within the left, as in Italy, was instigated or else exploitable by the forces of capital, reflected by Haya’s enthusiasm for collaboration with a “national bourgeoisie” against US imperialism.Footnote 56 Moreover, in light of Mariátegui’s embrace of “bureaucracy” as a necessary check on ideological innovation, the conventional emphasis upon his heterodoxy—especially vis-à-vis the contemporary institutions of world communism, which Mariátegui identified closely with the categories of “revolutionary bureaucracy” and “worker organization”—ought to be questioned.
Indeed, even in the case of actors towards whom Mariátegui was far more favorable than he was towards Haya or the Italian fascists, he was unforgiving about kneejerk critiques of bureaucracy. Thus, in his final essay on the Romanian socialist Panait Istrati (1884–1935), Mariátegui attributed Istrati’s recent anti-Stalinist turn to having “a psychology of ‘revolt’ … not of a revolutionary in the ideological and political sense of the term.” And whereas this psychology of “revolt” could be artistically generative for skilled writers, it was “essentially negative when it comes to political work. The true revolutionary is, although it seems paradoxical to some, a man of order,” such as Lenin.Footnote 57 By contrast, Istrati’s “impatient and impassioned temperament” led him to reject “the more prosaic and inferior aspects of the construction of socialism,” including the necessary role of bureaucracy.Footnote 58 Thus Mariátegui explained the anti-Stalinism of an admired socialist intellectual in strikingly similar (and pathologizing) terms as his explanations of Mussolini and, thence, of Haya de la Torre. Without adequate political discipline, including the acceptance of “revolutionary bureaucracy,” the affect and aesthetic of rebellion on the contemporary left carried the risk of what Mariátegui saw as political backsliding, deviation, or outright reaction.
Mariátegui thus interpreted aprismo as a nascently fascist form of politics, attributable to the subjective indiscipline of revolutionary actors. This indiscipline was both rooted in and causal to the breakdown of a unity of theory and practice between radical intellectuals and the working classes. Aprismo was also a distinctly “tropical” form of reaction for Mariátegui, insofar as it regressed to specifically Latin American traditions of personalist and demagogic political activity. Moreover, both of these modalities of aprismo identified by Mariátegui—as a local iteration of anticommunism within the global reaction against 1917, and as a specifically regional regression within the Latin American left to caudillismo and pre-/non-materialist politics—conspired to create a sui generis form of (semi)colonial fascism from within the anti-imperialist moment in early twentieth-century Latin America, encased by an empty rhetoric of indigeneity and anti-Europeanism.
Lastly, analyzing Mariátegui’s polemic against aprismo as being primarily a critique of intellectual indiscipline also involves upturning the prevalent convention about his association with exile. Whereas Mariátegui has been (justifiably) read as an exilic political thinker, due to his formative experiences of Western Europe from 1919 to 1923, his critique of aprismo after 1928 articulated concerns about the effect of (certain) diasporic conditions upon the development of Latin American revolutionary thought.Footnote 59 In a September 1929 letter to Esteban Pavletich (1906–81), a Peruvian Croatian comrade then living in Paris, Mariátegui argued that the material reality of exile and diaspora had been a condition of the reactionary emergence of aprismo from the Latin American left.Footnote 60
Haya had been exiled from Leguía’s Peru since 1923, travelling North America and Europe. He had founded APRA in México, and early apristas were concentrated among the Peruvian diaspora in Western Europe.Footnote 61 In Mariátegui’s 1929 letter, where he urged Pavletich, as a former secretary of the APRA cell in México City, to push that group away from its new anticommunist line, Mariátegui surveyed Haya’s reactionary turn. He argued that “Haya has situated himself in a terrain of petit bourgeois and opportunist caudillismo.”Footnote 62 Moreover, Mariátegui attributed this reorientation to the exilic conditions of Haya’s development since 1923. He argued that, abroad, Peruvian revolutionaries who do not follow a “severe discipline of studies are decoupled from our working class,” and as a result they become unfamiliar with the actual problems of the Peruvian workers unless they fully incorporate themselves to the proletarian movements of the foreign country where they reside. Thus, under the conditions of exile, it required a higher-level political commitment for intellectuals to maintain their revolutionary quality, whereas in Peru “they would maintain contact with our masses and our problems” more easily.Footnote 63
We can therefore discern the principal conditions of intellectual discipline for Mariátegui in his polemic against Haya as (1) the erudite and stoic traits of theoretical education in Marxist historical materialism and self-disciplined adherence to its analytical principles, and (2) a unity of theory and practice with the working class. The former could sustain Marxist rigor outside a unity between theory and practice only in the case of an exceptionally virtuous and temperate individual (the antithesis of Haya de la Torre, in Mariátegui’s view); thus it was not a solid basis for organizing a disciplined movement. Moreover, both of these conditions were more difficult to sustain in exile, especially outside the structures of the Communist International.
Mariátegui’s substantive critique of diasporic theoretical activity is remarkable because of how he has become—and was self-consciously—associated with exile himself. During the 1920s, nationalist criticism of Mariátegui’s Marxism in Peru connected his exile in Europe with a negatively valued “Europeanism.” Moreover, in direct response to this critique, Mariátegui doubled down on his experience of migration and diaspora in Europe, arguing that it had been a precious inflection point in his own political development towards a cosmopolitan Marxism that was the only contemporary framework in which the peculiar social needs of Peru and Latin America were intelligible in relation to their determinate global context of capitalist crisis.
Thus, in a December 1925 essay on “nationalism and vanguardism” in Peruvian literature, where Mariátegui defended the poet and future communist César Vallejo (1892–1938), who was then exiled in Paris, he argued that Vallejo’s indigenous themes were another “proof that, by these cosmopolitan and ecumenical journeys for which we are so reproached, we are growing ever closer to ourselves.”Footnote 64 The collective “we” here was precisely the revolutionary milieu of Peruvians defined by their “cosmopolitan” formation by (European) exile during the 1920s. In the same way, in a 1929 essay reviewing another Peruvian communist exile and writer, César Falcón (1892–1970), Mariátegui recalled that he had crossed paths with Falcón during his own time in Europe, and argued that, for both of them, “the journey through Europe had been the best, and most tremendous, discovery of America.”Footnote 65 Specifically, European exile had immunized both of them against the “super-Americanism” since pursued by aprismo, which went to excess in its rejection of a putatively “decadent” Europe, and it enabled them to instead make a “strict valuation of our [Latin America’s] possibilities,” including the denunciation of Latin American social defects and the acquisition of the enduring and new virtues of European civilization; Mariátegui also praised Falcón’s self-mastery and self-discipline, specifically, as a Latin American intellectual in the diaspora.Footnote 66
Thus, throughout the 1920s, Mariátegui maintained that exile could nourish rather than derail the intellectual development of Latin American revolutionaries, by deprovincializing their political outlook. Moreover, this is a historically valid thesis. Michael Goebel has shown that, for Latin Americans in Paris during the interwar period, including several members of Mariátegui’s network, imperial Europe was a space in which they could pioneer “South–South” connections with anti-imperialist activists from Africa and Asia as well as with the world communist movement. In the context of these organizational and social practices of exile and migration in Europe, more cosmopolitan and less exclusively hemispheric articulations of colonial liberation were produced.Footnote 67 Nevertheless, Mariátegui’s late 1920s critique of the aprista mode of diaspora did not contradict these other, positive appraisals of exile as a social condition of revolutionary formation. This was because Mariátegui recognized a material distinction between types of (semi)colonial diaspora in the West. Through his polemic with aprismo, Mariátegui distinguished a deleterious mode of exile and diaspora that was distinct from and opposed to that which he had experienced himself between 1919 and 1923: a reactionary anti-model of diaspora as against a communist, enlightening model. Moreover, the key difference was—again—the disciplinary force of a unity between theory and practice.
Mariátegui’s caveat in the Pavletich letter—that the disorienting effect of exile on Latin American intellectuals could be averted by embedding them in the local labor movement—was a significant one: that is precisely what Mariátegui did in Italy during the Biennio Rosso.Footnote 68 Thus the value of diaspora to Latin American revolutionary praxis was dependent upon its particular social conditions: migration and diaspora were enriching as long as they did not disrupt one’s contact with the proletariat, understood as a global presence, by slipping into a socially isolated intellectualism. The backsliding of Haya was due to the fact that his experience and practice of exile were, in Mariátegui’s view, concentrated in academic and otherwise overly theoretical settings, therefore, rather than functioning to globalize and modernize the Latin American understanding of imperialism, capitalism, and revolution, the aprista anti-model of exile diminished this understanding and functioned as a cause of intellectual disorientation and indiscipline.
By rereading Mariátegui’s polemic against aprismo as a sustained critique of intellectual indiscipline, we uncover a far more ambiguous relationship between his theory, on the one hand, and the culture and practice of diaspora, on the other, than has been traditionally assumed, and we find new complexities within his theory of revolutionary cosmopolitanism in the interwar world.
Mariátegui’s positive models of intellectual discipline
Mariátegui’s discussions of intellectual discipline were not purely negative. Based on his critiques of intellectualism and drawing on models available in the context of the global left, Mariátegui also elaborated and enacted positive forms of disciplined Marxist activity during the 1920s. The common thread was an “organic” unity of theory and practice, but Mariátegui’s ideal of a revolutionary intellectual was also complex and varied over time. He articulated this ideal in his own practice, but also through the construction of various ideal types, including Henri Barbusse’s Clarté project and communist surrealism in France, as well as the political culture of the Russian Bolshevik Party, and, as Mariátegui grew concerned about the Comintern’s direction of travel at the end of the 1920s, he looked to figures outside Communist structures, including the Italian Piero Gobetti, to enquire how historical materialism could be sustained outside the formal organization of the Communist Party.
In practice: Mariátegui as a disciplined intellectual
Mariátegui consciously tried to embody his ideal of revolutionary intellectual discipline in his own activity. Even at the level of his quotidian work routine in Lima, Mariátegui applied the regimentation and orderliness that he idealized in European thinkers as an “austere” subjectivity, contrasted to a peculiarly “Creole” intemperance.Footnote 69 Politically, Mariátegui also elaborated his theoretical work in the midst of organized labor at the Peruvian, Latin American, and global levels. He was active in union politics and organizing in Lima, and it was in this context that he developed important ideas including his critique of left sectarianism and his related emphasis on the flexibility of Marxism as a method of analysis.Footnote 70 Moreover, as mentioned, Mariátegui also cofounded a Peruvian communist party in 1928 amid the schism with Haya, and he served as its first general secretary. Again, Mariátegui articulated significant theoretical interventions in this role, including through party documents and, as seen above, in his efforts to corral and organize comrades in the face of the aprista challenge.Footnote 71 Mariátegui’s editorial work was also oriented towards the practical questions of party formation and worker organization.Footnote 72
Moreover, Mariátegui developed his theoretical activity—especially during the later 1920s—in the context of the internally pluralist yet politically disciplined institutions of international communism, which he understood as the framework of worker organization at the global level. Mariátegui attempted to connect the Peruvian communist movement to the Comintern as the latter’s infrastructure expanded in South America, and he articulated a number of key interventions regarding the Marxist theorization of indigeneity, racialization, the peasantry, imperialism, and the (semi)colonial bourgeoisie within and for Comintern forums, including the Constituent Congress of the Latin American Trade Union Conference and the first Latin American Communist Conference, both held in 1929. And in June of that year, Mariátegui was himself named to the General Council of the Comintern-aligned League against Imperialism, an organization that he championed in his writing. Mariátegui’s commitment to the Comintern’s organizational ecosystem involved the self-conscious moderation of his public writing, especially on themes to do with Soviet politics: for example, in his reserved response to the exile of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940).Footnote 73 For Mariátegui, a Peruvian distant even from the Atlantic focus of the Comintern within South America, this self-moderation was based on the voluntary belief that the Soviet state of the 1920s embodied the locus and vanguard of socialist world revolution. In this view, political commitment to the latter ideal entailed public discipline and restraint when it came to the former state actor.
It is evident from Mariátegui’s relationship with the Comintern that, as a space for theoretical activity during the 1920s, the organization represented a generative middle ground between ideological discipline and innovation in South America. In this context, communist skepticism towards heterodoxy was not (yet) reducible to intellectual unfreedom within and around the Third International. Rather, as has been shown by diverse scholars, the early Comintern formed an unprecedented type of context for political thought insofar as it facilitated the comingling of (semi)colonial and Western revolutionaries for the discussion and critique of capitalist imperialism as a global system, and the imagining of a new, world-making project of the oppressed classes and nations of that system in its entirety.Footnote 74 Latin American participation in the League against Imperialism and in the Comintern infrastructure within South America itself during the 1920s was a decisive moment in the conceptual globalization of the approach to anti-imperialism and social revolution in the region, where it had hitherto been primarily hemispheric.Footnote 75 Moreover, whereas this unique climate of politically committed intellectual creativity in communist Latin America would diminish under the pressures of Stalinism during the 1930s, it did (just about) hold together for the duration of Mariátegui’s life, justifying and manifesting that balance between discipline and heterodoxy in revolutionary political thought that he had always endorsed.
Henri Barbusse and Clarté
Henri Barbusse was an important influence on Mariátegui’s critique of intellectualism. But Barbusse offered Mariátegui a positive model of intellectual activity too. Mariátegui interpreted Barbusse as a model communist intellectual for the post-1917 epoch, insofar as the Frenchman rooted his theoretical work about themes including internationalism and antimilitarism in his practical activity as a communist militant, such as his agitation among the French Army against the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr.Footnote 76 Mariátegui also interpreted Barbusse’s publishing project, Clarté, as a model of revolutionary journalism, and it directly influenced the cosmopolitan scope and relative (but not open-ended) pluralism of Mariátegui’s own publications, especially Amauta. Mariátegui idealized Clarté in 1924 as the attempted fusion of a left, antimilitarist “International of Thought,” which had emerged from diverse progressive critiques of the Great War (including Barbusse’s own work), with the Comintern. Mariátegui argued that Clarté had “led the International of Thought toward the path of the Communist International.”Footnote 77 Thus Mariátegui represented the Clarté “movement” as a sort of communist Republic of Letters crafted by Barbusse and his comrades in France from the transnational avant-garde of interwar Europe. He characterized it in glowing terms as “an effort of the intelligentsia to commit itself to the revolution and an effort of the revolution to win over the intelligentsia. Revolutionary ideas must dislodge conservative ideas not only from the institutions but also from the mentality and spirit of humanity.”Footnote 78 For Mariátegui, this fusion of the intelligentsia and the revolution by Clarté concretized the unity of theory and practice, creating the conditions for a mode of intellectual activity that could overcome the antipolitical aversion of intellectuals to “discipline, programs, and systems.” He argued that the Clarté movement thus demonstrated “how revolutionary action cannot be individual or solitary—it must be collective politics.”Footnote 79 Quoting Barbusse directly, Mariátegui argued that “to do politics is to pass from dreams to reality, from the abstract to the concrete. Politics is the real work of social thought; politics is life.”Footnote 80 Thus Clarté modelled a productive synthesis between communist political organization and intellectual activity, and it was only by that synthesis that the reactionary tendencies of modern culture could be restrained.
Moreover, while emphasizing the role of political commitment and discipline in Barbusse’s intellectual work, Mariátegui also commended how this model of communist journalism reconciled a significant openness towards non-Marxist currents of thought. In a later 1928 article, Mariátegui appraised Barbusse’s new journal, Monde, for how it included a range of noncommunist thinkers. But this was not an unlimited pluralism. Rather, it was restricted to thinkers of the broad left, such as the noncommunist Albert Einstein (1879–1955), contrasted to the forces of “reaction.” The finite pluralism of Monde embodied Mariátegui’s own conviction that Marxism could cohabit and draw upon adjacent intellectual currents in philosophy and art, such as vitalism, Freudianism, and indigenismo, insofar as the latter could be made consonant with the analytical principles of historical materialism.Footnote 81 Non-Marxist thought could enrich Marxism but only on these terms. Thus the disciplinary limits on plurality were as important as plurality itself for Mariátegui—which made left pluralism a delicate practice. Indeed, in 1928, Mariátegui concluded that Barbusse’s original project of a fusion between “the international of thought” and communist internationalism was actually chimerical, because “[t]he doctrinal line is a function of party. Intellectuals, insofar as they are intellectuals, cannot associate to establish it.”Footnote 82 Thus the necessary, disciplined work of communist praxis belonged to a distinct category of journalism—the “press of doctrine” as opposed to the “press of information” represented by Monde. A press of doctrine, embodied in communist party newspapers, involved a measure of doctrinal rigor and political commitment of which intellectuals qua intellectuals were incapable due to their aforementioned tendency to heterodoxy.Footnote 83 The value of the more plural “press of information,” as well as preserving a space for freer debate with the wider, more heterogeneous left, was instead to persuade people outside the communist movement to join it, whereas party papers lacked a sufficient readership to do so.Footnote 84 And yet Mariátegui’s new distinction between press of doctrine and press of information signified an acceptance that key areas of revolutionary theory and practice were not possible under conditions of excessive pluralism, even within the wider left.
Mariátegui’s ideal of Barbusse articulated an incomplete effort to reconcile the tensions between communist political commitment and intellectual pluralism, first through synthesis and then through a division of labor. Moreover, for Mariátegui, this ideal had as much to do with recognizing the limits of pluralism as a resource for social revolution as its opportunities. And this theme of Mariátegui’s thought can be—and has been—occluded by the conventional emphasis on his intellectual heterodoxy and autonomy, insofar as those categories have been juxtaposed with the practical imperatives of political commitment under early communism.
Surrealism
A second model of disciplined intellectual activity that Mariátegui drew from the postwar French left was surrealism.Footnote 85 Most associated with the communist André Breton, Mariátegui argued that surrealism was antithetical to Italian Futurism, rejecting the tendency of observers to conflate the two as similarly avant-garde forms of contemporary art. In Mariátegui’s mature account of these two artistic currents in 1930, he distinguished both from the rest of the European avant-garde by their political commitment as opposed to the merely formalist process of “affirming certain aesthetic postulates and experimenting with certain artistic principles.”Footnote 86 Moreover, Futurism was also different from other contemporary forms of right-wing art in its orientation to the future rather than a feudal past.
For Mariátegui, Futurism became subsumed by fascist counterrevolution whereas surrealism was committed to communist revolution for two reasons. First, Futurism was already part of the Italian academic establishment when the Fascists seized control of the state. By contrast, surrealism was a more socially “organic” form of “movement” art, counterposed by Mariátegui to the mere “technique” that obsessed artists qua artists; surrealism represented a form of aesthetic activity rooted in the popular, “organic” social contexts of the French labor movement.Footnote 87 For Mariátegui, surrealism
has a sense of political responsibility, of its civil duties, and it has affiliated to a party. And, on this plane, it has behaved in a very different way to futurism. Instead of launching a program of surrealist politics, it accepts and subscribes to that of the present, concrete revolution: the Marxist program of the proletarian revolution. It recognizes the unique validity of the Marxist movement on the social, political, and economic terrain.Footnote 88
Thus, whereas the Futurists were socially isolated within the Italian establishment and therefore exposed to co-optation by the new Fascist state, French surrealism had been made and kept faithful to communist politics because it was embedded in the working class; it was delimited and empowered by a unity between theory and practice.
Mariátegui’s second reason for the divergent paths of surrealism and Futurism was, as mentioned above, that Futurism had set loose its aesthetic experimentation and “absurdity” upon the sphere of political action itself, which was a cultural practice constitutive of fascism. By contrast, “The surrealists only exercise their right to absurdity, to absolute subjectivism, in art. They carry themselves prudently in all other realms.”Footnote 89 Also in 1930, contrasting surrealism to the “ultra-decadent aestheticism” of nihilist art as well as the political disengagement of literary “populism” in France, Mariátegui praised how surrealism, “accepting the validity of Marxism on the social and political plane, has made the most honorable effort to impose upon itself, against its centrifugal and anarchic impulse, a discipline in the struggle against the capitalist order.”Footnote 90 Thus Mariátegui imagined surrealism as the positive model of how to elaborate theoretical and aesthetic activity to its most experimental, subjectivist, and heterodox degree without transgressing a broader, determinate framework of communist political organization and commitment. For Mariátegui, the clear delimitation of a “realm” for plurality in art—as in journalism—was integral to his overall understanding of the value of intellectual innovation per se; the demarcation of spaces for heterodoxy by the frameworks of Marxism and the world communist movement were two mutually constitutive poles of Mariátegui’s thought. And the overemphasis of his heterodox departures within Marxism can miss this point: the immanent relationship between intellectual heterodoxy and political discipline in Mariátegui’s work.
Moreover, this observation is also instructive for understanding Mariátegui’s wider exploration of irrationalism in contemporary politics and art, such as Sorelian political philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis. In the former case, Mariátegui was aware of how Sorel’s vitalist conceptual world could be extended towards fascism, but he was confident that, if used under the conditions of organized labor and Marxist method, certain Sorelian concepts—especially the idea of a “myth” capable of mobilizing collective action—could be worked to elaborate a new, revolutionary socialism after 1917 by displacing the passive approach of the Second International. Mariátegui thus defended the Leninist potential of Georges Sorel’s vitalism even as it began to be invoked by European fascists.Footnote 91 Similarly, Mariátegui saw Freudian psychoanalysis as a potential ally of Marxism. Both demystified capitalist social reality: Freud by exposing the irrational, libidinal conditions of individual psychology, and Marx by exposing the determination of group ideology by class interests. Following the Trotskyist critic Max Eastman, Mariátegui suggested in 1928 that Marxism could even be understood as psychoanalysis at the level of society. But Mariátegui also pointed out that actually existing Freudians made poor allies for social revolution due to their class position as bourgeois intellectuals disengaged from the labor movement. Thus they tended to pathologize the Marxist “revolutionary attitude” as a form of neurosis, in order to justify the existing capitalist order.Footnote 92 It was the unity of theory and practice that allowed the revolutionary potential of irrationalist traditions of thought to be realized—in its absence, Mariátegui recognized that such thinking could develop instead into conservatism or counterrevolution.
Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party
The end of the 1920s was a moment of heightening contradictions in the relationship between Marxist intellectual autonomy and communist political discipline for Mariátegui. On the one hand, in the context of the 1928 schism with aprismo, Mariátegui was increasingly concerned by the danger of indiscipline among revolutionary thinkers. But at the same time, Mariátegui was becoming concerned by a perceptible slippage within the international communist movement from an appropriate degree of political and doctrinal discipline towards an intellectual dogmatism that threatened to undermine the organic unity of communist theory and practice. The latter tendency, which reflected early Stalinism in the USSR, was the context for Mariátegui’s famous (albeit still comradely) polemics with the Comintern leadership in South America, especially under the Italian-born Argentine Victorio Codovilla (1894–1970).Footnote 93 Thus, during his last two years, Mariátegui noticed potential flaws with his hitherto consistent presupposition that the organizational infrastructure of world communism since 1917 adequately fulfilled the category of proletarian “practice” in the formulaic unity between theory and practice needed for revolutionary intellectual activity.
It was in this context that between 1927 and 1929 Mariátegui learned of the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the Russian Communist Party and then his exile from the USSR. Significantly, Trotsky had represented to Mariátegui the ideal of Bolshevik Marxism, embodying the key features of Mariátegui’s own understanding of the project—especially its world-making cosmopolitanism.Footnote 94 Moreover, Trotsky’s 1925 work, Where Is Britain Going?, had been a significant theoretical influence on Mariátegui’s understanding of “capitalist stabilization” during the late 1920s.Footnote 95 The public break between the Soviet regime and Trotsky from 1927 was therefore problematic for Mariátegui. As he reflected in 1929, “Trotsky, exiled from Soviet Russia; behold an event that the revolutionary opinion of the world cannot easily accommodate itself to.”Footnote 96 In an explicitly pessimistic tone, Mariátegui likened the expulsion of Trotsky to the French Revolution “devouring its own heroes.”Footnote 97
However, in public, Mariátegui never condemned Stalin’s government for its move against Trotsky. Moreover, in not doing this, Mariátegui both practically manifested his own ideal of intellectual discipline vis-à-vis the Comintern and the Soviet Union, and, in his published analyses of the split, actually explained the event in terms of Trotsky’s own indiscipline. In fact, the question of Trotsky’s exile was a key context in which Mariátegui elaborated his mature theory of communist intellectual activity. Mariátegui characterized the expulsion of Trotsky—in a formally value-neutral register—as the necessary consequence of Trotsky’s incapacity to conform to the changing practical needs of communist development inside the USSR, namely consolidation and economic development at the national level. Mariátegui attributed this to Trotsky’s dispositional inability for gradualist, mundane statecraft,
Trotsky, personally disconnected from the Stalinist team, is an excessive figure on the plane of national accomplishment. One imagines him destined to march across Europe in triumph, with Napoleonic energy and majesty, at the head of the red army, the socialist evangel. One does not think of him, with the same ease, fulfilling the modest role of a minister in normal times.Footnote 98
Moreover, as in Mariátegui’s contemporary critique of Haya, he attributed the disjuncture between Trotsky and the national imperatives of Soviet development to exile. Mariátegui argued that Soviet Russia, amid the temporary recession of world revolution in the context of capitalist stabilization at the end of the 1920s, required statesmen sensitive to its peculiarly national needs:
Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries who were always rooted in Russian soil: the prison or Siberia were still Russia. Whereas Trotsky and Zinoviev, Radek, and Rakovsky, belong to a phalanx which spent most of their lives in exile. In exile they did their apprenticeship as world revolutionaries, and that apprenticeship has given the Russian Revolution its universalist language, its ecumenical vision. For now, alone with its problems, Russia prefers simpler and more purely Russian men.Footnote 99
There is a discernible similarity between Mariátegui’s effort to (passively) legitimize the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR—albeit in a context where he was fearful that the schism would be politically exploited by anticommunists if it was not effectively downplayedFootnote 100—and his account of Haya’s reactionary abandonment of socialism: both processes could be traced to the way in which exile loosened the tethers between a revolutionary’s theoretical activity and the concrete social context to which it was oriented.
However, there are key differences between Mariátegui’s analysis of the Trotskyists’ exile and the apristas’, pertaining to the aforementioned distinction between positive and negative types of revolutionary exile in the Pavletich letter. Unlike Haya, Trotsky’s circle was embedded in the revolutionary labor movement of Central and Western Europe while he was exiled there: “in exile they did their apprenticeship as world revolutionaries.”Footnote 101 Thus the Russian Bolsheviks’ practice of diaspora in Europe was analogous to the positive model that Mariátegui identified with himself and the other Peruvian communists, not the aprista anti-model. And the Trotskyists’ exile during the 1900s and 1910s was historically prior to the Peruvians’ during the 1920s, therefore, in Mariátegui’s account, they did not merely imbibe the world-making cosmopolitanism of Bolshevik Marxism through their diaspora but they created it there: their “apprenticeship” as revolutionaries in exile “has given the Russian Revolution its universalist language, its ecumenical vision.”Footnote 102
Exilic Trotskyism had endowed Marxist thought with its most valuable attribute for Mariátegui. However, in Mariátegui’s account of the Trotsky–Stalin split, it becomes apparent that in his understanding of Bolshevism, whereas the movement tended ultimately to the world revolution, it could, in response to temporary periods of stabilization of the capitalist world system (albeit within the broader arc of terminal capitalist crisis after 1914), require retreat to the national level of social and political development. Indeed, Mariátegui was experiencing similar pressures on communism in Peru at the end of the 1920s, in the context of intensifying efforts to Other the movement as antinational by both APRA and the Leguía regime—efforts that compelled Mariátegui to compromise his own cosmopolitan preferences and reorient his applications of Marxism towards a peculiarly Peruvian frame.Footnote 103
However, this practice of national(ist) compromise for Mariátegui was always only provisional relative to the cosmopolitan telos of the socialist world revolution. This was because Mariátegui’s Marxist understanding of historical time remained robustly providential, in part due to the fact that he lived after and outside, and died before, key events and conjunctures—such as World War I inside Europe, the deepening of Stalinism during the 1930s, and the victories of fascism during the 1930s and 1940s—that motivated other (near) contemporary Marxists to admit significant elements of contingency to their vision of socialist triumph.Footnote 104 On the basis of Mariátegui’s belief in the inevitable return of Bolshevism to its cosmopolitan essence, therefore, he was able to imagine that Trotskyism could become a legitimate opposition within the Soviet and international communist movement, fulfilling the key function of sustaining the ideals and practices of Bolshevik cosmopolitanism through intra-communist debate during the current period when the actual policy of the Soviet state needed to be geared to national development for prudential reasons. Mariátegui argued as late as 1929 that “Trotskyist opinion has a useful function in Soviet politics. It represents, to define it in two words, Marxist orthodoxy, in the face of the unruly flow of Russian reality … The NEP condemns him to return to his belligerent position as a polemicist.”Footnote 105 We can see in this speech act how Mariátegui used ortodoxia as a positive term, to denote what he understood as the cosmopolitan and internationalist conception of socialist revolution that was essential to Bolshevik Marxism. For Mariátegui, Trotskyist dissent within world communism was necessary to sustain this cosmopolitan essence amid and against the prudential compromises that were required of Soviet policy makers by the “unruly flow of reality” until the (inevitable) failure of capitalist stabilization, when the ideal of socialist world revolution could reassume its determinate role in Soviet politics.Footnote 106
Mariátegui argued that the coexistence of Trotskyism and Stalinism was possible by historicizing the current schism. In order to dismiss anticommunist representations of the Trotsky–Stalin split as terminal for the Bolshevik revolutionary project as a whole, Mariátegui argued that it was merely one instance of a longer history of conflictive yet fecund plurality within Russian communism, traceable to Lenin. To make this argument, Mariátegui rejected the hostile description of Bolshevism as necessarily homogeneous and top-down, and he claimed instead that the Bolsheviks—as the protagonists of a world-historical revolution—had always allowed for, and developed through, vigorous internal debate. Mariátegui argued that observers of Russia ought not to expect that “the enterprise of organizing the first great socialist state would be fulfilled by a party of more than a million passionate militants … without debates nor violent conflicts.”Footnote 107
For Mariátegui, it was because the Russian Revolution was a labor of “heroic” activists that “maximal and tremendous tension” had been a normal feature of its politics since the outset. Here Mariátegui invoked “heroism,” a key, positive concept in his voluntaristic conceptualization of Marxism, to normalize and valorize profound ruptures within communism as a sign of the movement’s vitality: precisely because Bolshevik subjectivity was defined by a vital and voluntarist revolutionary heroism, “the Bolshevik party … is not nor can it be a gentle and unanimous academy.”Footnote 108 Even under Lenin’s now hallowed leadership, “The Bolshevik Party never submitted passively to Lenin’s orders, about whose despotism a pamphleteering journalism that could not imagine him except as a red tsar fantasized.”Footnote 109 Instead of the anticommunist caricature, the reality had been that Lenin gained and reproduced his authority among the Bolsheviks through a process of persuasion, by offering the most compelling and lucid analyses of social reality.Footnote 110
Thus, through Mariátegui’s interventions on the issue of Trotsky’s expulsion at the end of the 1920s, he elaborated an ideal of the Bolshevik Party itself as a positive model of the balance between intellectual autonomy and discipline, a balance which had been capable of containing different and contradictory applications of Marxism while functioning as an effective organization for the enactment of socialist revolution and state building. Indeed, Mariátegui argued that a “less disciplined and organic party than the Russian Communist Party” would collapse under such a tension between the two imperatives of pluralism and coordinated political commitment—the necessary, constitutive tension of modern social revolution—but it was the virtues of (1) political discipline and (2) “organicity” (which, for Mariátegui, meant the rootedness of a movement in the social formation that it was trying to revolutionize) that made the Bolshevik Party capable of living through this tension.
Moreover, the balance of discipline and autonomy hitherto embodied by the Bolshevik Party, as distinct from absolute discipline or “despotism,” was crucial for Mariátegui because, “without vigilant critique, which is the best proof of the vitality of the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet government would probably run the risk of falling into a formalist and mechanical bureaucratism.”Footnote 111 Mariátegui’s 1928–9 prediction or hope that Trotskyism could maintain a place within the field of world communism was therefore not optional but essential for preventing the decay of Soviet communism from the organizational ideal of “revolutionary bureaucracy,” which fascism and aprismo had rebelled against, to the “formalist and mechanical bureaucratism” that Mariátegui knew was a key feature of emergent communist critiques of the Stalin regime, including Trotsky’s. Thus, whereas the Bolshevik Party represented Mariátegui’s ideal combination of intellectual autonomy, innovation, and discipline, he also recognized the increasing fragility of that combination at the end of the 1920s amid the onset of Stalinism.
Intellectual discipline outside the Comintern
In the context of Mariátegui’s incipient doubts about the trajectory of the Comintern under Stalin and its implications for Marxism at the end of the 1920s, he theorized how historical materialism could be sustained by a unity between theory and practice outside the institutional structures of the world communist movement. Mariátegui did this through his July 1929 characterization of the Italian radical liberal and antifascist intellectual Piero Gobetti (1901–26). Although formally a profile of Gobetti, Mariátegui’s essay was also a semi-oblique critique of the dogmatic—as distinct from doctrinal—excesses of top-down organization within the Comintern as it was developing in South America.Footnote 112
In the text, Mariátegui emphasized how Gobetti had developed a materialist understanding of social reality without a “hermetic Marxist education” through “an autonomous and very free maturation of his thought.”Footnote 113 Gobetti’s intellectual autonomy, in Mariátegui’s analysis, allowed gainful openness to non-Marxist currents, including the distinctively “Italian intellectual tradition” represented by Machiavelli, Vico, and others, and aesthetic enquiry about cultural topics.Footnote 114 However, crucially, the heterogeneity of Gobetti’s intellectual formation did not prevent him from understanding the economic basis of social and cultural development, and this argument was Mariátegui’s implicit critique of the increasingly dogmatic posture of his interlocutors within the Comintern. Gobetti was able to develop a critical, materialist analysis of society outside Comintern structures and without the need for top-down party lines to define Marxism. In Mariátegui’s analysis, moreover, the reason for Gobetti’s understanding of historical materialism from outside the Comintern was, in addition to his reading of Marxian political economy, the practical experience of an organic unity between theory and practice in the context of the workers’ councils and wider proletarian struggle of the Biennio Rosso in northern Italy after World War I.Footnote 115 The distinctiveness of Mariátegui’s appraisal of Gobetti here was that the function of the unity of theory and practice as a necessary check on the disorganizing tendencies of intellectualism, including the decay of intellectual plurality into a lack of any doctrinal coherence whatsoever, could subsist outside formal communist political organizations.
Thus, whereas the association of Mariátegui’s intellectual interest in Gobetti with his own openness to heterodox thinkers is valid, it ought not to be confused with an embrace of heterodoxy for its own sake.Footnote 116 Rather, Gobetti represented for Mariátegui an alternative model of intellectual discipline that conformed to the doctrinal framework of historical materialism by embedding in organized labor yet without the top-down institutional structures of the Comintern, in a historical moment when the necessary balance between intellectual autonomy and discipline which Bolshevism had achieved in 1917 appeared to Mariátegui to be breaking down.
Conclusion
By reading Mariátegui as an advocate and theorist of intellectual discipline, understood in terms of a non-exhaustively open idea of Marxist “doctrine” and the practical condition of a unity between revolutionary theory and practice, this article has questioned well-established conventions about his heterodoxy as a thinker. In doing so, it has also rejected the ahistorical tendency of decolonial theory to divorce the interpretation of Mariátegui’s thought from its Marxist framework. Moreover, the article has also upturned the conventional association between Mariátegui and exile, uncovering his neglected and complex critique of diaspora as a potentially disorganizing force vis-à-vis revolutionary subjectivity.
However, by revisiting Mariátegui as a theorist of intellectual discipline and critic of heterodoxy, this article has not found any cause to question his innovativeness as a Marxist thinker; quite the opposite. The article has argued both that Mariátegui’s critique of the intellectual condition and its heterodoxy was itself creative in the context of the interwar Latin American left, and, crucially, that Mariátegui’s theorization of discipline and orthodoxy had an immanent relationship to his better-known heterodox departures in Marxism, not an exclusive one. Insofar as Mariátegui recognized the positive value of intellectual heterodoxy, it was defined by the limits of political discipline, and insofar as Mariátegui recognized the value of political discipline, it was only to the extent that the communist institutions enacting it maintained space for debate as a source of vitality through dissent, to prevent regressive forms of bureaucratization and dogmatism. Mariátegui’s understanding of Marxist orthodoxy and heterodoxy was thus holistic, connected by a “maximal and tremendous tension” that might have become unbearable in the years after 1930.
Moreover, this lens is useful for the study of Mariátegui’s more canonical texts, too, such as Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality and “Programmatic Principles of the Peruvian Socialist Party.” This article has focused on his less-well-known writings concerned with the theorization of the intellectual condition, allowing for new, close readings of neglected Mariátegui texts, such as the analysis of Gobetti. However, the approach it uncovers in Mariátegui, avoiding a sharp binary between intellectual discipline and autonomy, was also at work in his more familiar innovations upon European Marxism. Thus Mariátegui’s theorization of the indigenous peasantry of Peru as a potential agent of socialist revolution, distinct from the “orthodox” industrial proletariat of Marxian philosophy, nevertheless insisted upon the mediating and pedagogical role of an indigenous cadre trained in the urban proletariat.Footnote 117
Furthermore, Mariátegui’s well-known 1928 statement that “we … do not wish socialism in America to be an imitation and copy. It must be a heroic creation,” is routinely decontextualized.Footnote 118 Rather than articulate a break with European Marxism, this speech act was actually intended by Mariátegui to undermine aprista regionalism in Peru, as he realigned his journal Amauta from a left pluralist to an explicitly socialist position. While conceding that “socialism in America” ought to have a distinctive “style,” Mariátegui was insisting that it must remain part of the unitary, global project of world revolution based in Russia. He was dismissing the aprista demand for an autochthonously Latin American model of social revolution, distinct or autonomous from the socialist world revolution. And Mariátegui attributed this demand to the problem of intellectualism as opposed to socially embedded political theory, the exact critique excavated by this article:
The perfect, absolute, abstract idea, indifferent to facts, to changing and mobile reality, is useless; what is useful is the germinal, concrete, dialectical, and operative idea, rich in potential and capable of movement. Amauta is not a diversion or game of pure intellectuals: it professes a historical idea, confesses an active and mass faith, and obeys a contemporary social movement. In the struggle between two systems, between two ideas, it does not occur to us to be spectators or to invent a third term. Extreme originality is a literary and anarchic preoccupation. On our banner, we inscribe this singe, simple, and grand word: Socialism.Footnote 119
This article therefore offers a heuristic useful for the analysis of Mariátegui’s wider oeuvre of political writings. Complex, nonexclusive relationships between political discipline, Marxist orthodoxy, and heterodox innovation also structured his famous vision for “Indo-American socialism” in South America. Moreover, beyond Mariátegui and Latin America, this heuristic can illuminate others in the Marxist tradition romanticized for their intellectual heterodoxy. Gramsci was similarly critical of intellectuals’ incapacity for political discipline; Karl Korsch, a pioneer of Western Marxism, was committed to the apparent drudgery of workers’ education centered on a relatively orthodox version of historical materialism; and in the colonial world, C. L. R. James recognized the importance of movement discipline, albeit with a more transparent relationship between leadership and the masses than Stalinism imposed.Footnote 120 Similar to decolonial readings of Mariátegui, there has been a tendency in scholarship to take the evident heterodoxy of these Marxists as license to downplay or else elide their theoretical and practical attachments to the Marxist tradition and the world communist movement.Footnote 121 But a more historical understanding of how heterodoxy has related to orthodoxy in Marxism allows for a less binary approach, not only to these individual thinkers but to the Marxist tradition as a whole.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the whole editorial team at Modern Intellectual History, but especially Tracie Matysik, who has been an immense help throughout the submission and peer review process. I am also extremely grateful to the peer reviewers themselves, whose thoughtful comments have significantly improved this article. And, as always, this work would not have come to fruition without the constant support and advice of my wife, Annie. I should make special mention of my colleague Tanroop Sandhu, too, a fellow historian of the Marxist intellectual tradition and valued interlocutor for thinking through Mariátegui and his interwar contemporaries. There are too many others in my support network (academic and personal) to acknowledge individually, so I will acknowledge them instead as a (treasured) whole.
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